1. Field of the Invention
The invention claimed herein generally relates to method and apparatus for an integrated entity of a personalized data resource that can provide both personalized integration of data received from, and offline interactions with, the world wide web (WWW) as well as integrated operations that can be applied to the integrated personalized data resource (with its data elements sourced from various internet domains across the WWW). More particularly, the invention relates to an apparatus of the above type that can be used to aggregate data on a personalized basis, wherein the data pertains to a particular domain or category, and has been gathered from different sources of the WWW. Even more particularly, the invention pertains to an apparatus of the above type wherein the apparatus can automatically interact with the WWW, such as getting the latest bank account balance or the like. Integrated operations can be defined to operate upon the aggregated personalized data resource in parts or in whole as one integrated unit of operations. For example: common checkout operation across personalized shopping carts across multiple e-commerce sites of the WWW.
2. Description of the Related Art
Apart from browsing for general information, by using a search engine or the like, the WWW is used for accessing critical personalized information across quite a variety of domains. Examples of this information include personal financial balances; on-line purchases of goods or services; scheduled upcoming flights with particular air carriers; and health records with particular hospitals or other healthcare institutions. However, there is currently a lack of an integrated entity, to both collect and persist or retain these different yet aggregated and possibly related aspects pertaining to user's personalized information, wherein the entity can be selectively manipulated. For example, an individual user could seek to manipulate data obtained from different sources, that all pertained to the same aspect or category, by presenting the data so that it could be viewed in a cohesive, integrated manner.
At present, a collection of bookmarks of all links to various domains can be used to fetch various pieces of information about a specific user, each time that the information is needed. However, this “personalized bookmark” mechanism has a number of limitations. For example, such mechanism lacks a persistence capability, so that an individual user needs to fetch information for each bookmark using the browser every time each of the bookmarks is needed, and then perform the same sequence of user interactions like logon; clicking on links to get to the right page, and providing the same user input e.g. bank account number every time, in order to aggregate the personalized information. Also, an aggregated and integrated entity of personalized user information that is composited from responses of a list of personalized domains will not be available, when a user is offline or is otherwise not connected to the Internet.
Moreover, the concept of an integrated personalized data resource entity, that is constructed from various web applications of the Internet, generally cannot be used to perform certain operations. For example, it is generally not possible to perform a “print” operation of the aggregated financial “aspects” of personalized user information from the domains of various financial institutions. It is also generally not possible to perform the “send operation” of the aggregated “health” aspect of personalized user information, from the domain of various health institutions to the user's family doctor. A further operation that is generally not available with prior art approaches is to “view” the aggregated “shopping” aspect of an individual user, from the domains of various online retailers, in order to see all the shopping carts that the user then has in the WWW.